It is no secret that Lewis Hamilton had a weird season, with all sorts of horrendous moments on track where he seemed to lose the sense of things. He said himself that he had felt a little adrift this year, and a lot of people said this was due to his choice of dropping his dad as a manager in order to take up a show business management agency.
Bernie Ecclestone has now added his opinion on this in an interview with the Guardian newspaper, in which he said: “I think it’s a disaster,” Ecclestone said. “He gets to meet people that probably he wouldn’t have met, and [who] have probably the wrong sort of influence on him. He’s at the age, perhaps, and he has the amount of money, where when he’s influenced, he can carry things through, which he wouldn’t normally have done.”
Compare to Hamilton’s teammate this year, Jenson Button, who was well surrounded with his girlfriend, father, and even his personal trainer, Mike Collier. Teams are made up of so many different people and combinations of people, that we often fail to see how the subtlties can influence the whole.